Chapter 1: Thursday, November 10, 2005--11:34 p.m.

“Let smiles cease,” Converse said. “Let laughter flee. This is the place where everybody finds out who they are.”

Hicks shook his head.

“What a bummer for the gooks.”
Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone

I read too much and watch too many movies. I never experience anything directly. I measure everything that happens to me against what I’ve read or watched. Without the filter of somebody else’s imagination, I understand nothing. During my first years as a professional expatriate, I viewed the strange new countries where I was posted through the lens of The Wizard of Oz--an odd choice for a heterosexual man. The locals were either cute and helpful like the Munchkins, or terrifying and mindless like the Wicked Witch’s winged monkeys. I staged departures as dramatically as Dorothy’s from the Emerald City, with tearful pledges of lasting friendships and undying memories, although I never managed to accumulate much in the way of brains or heart or courage along the way.

When I volunteered for the job with RAG, the U.S. Embassy’s Research and Analysis Group, in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom, purportedly to advise the Iraqi Ministry of Defense on intelligence analysis, it occurred to me that I may finally have left Wizard of Oz metaphors behind, despite surface similarities between the Emerald City and Baghdad’s Green Zone. I had racked up a quarter-century’s worth of postings to such garden spots as Zaire and Chad and Angola, becoming one of the U.S. Government’s leading experts in watching--and sometimes helping--Third-World countries swirl down the plumbing fixtures of history. I had also gone through two marriages and estranged a couple of kids. I could no longer convince myself that there was any link between my life and the story of a young innocent swept into fantasyland. I needed a new myth and a new set of images to explain my life. So, when I arrived in Baghdad in mid-2005, I was hoping I could use The Year of Living Dangerously. I was of course thinner in the scalp and thicker in the middle than a young Mel Gibson, and would probably have trouble befriending a mystically-minded dwarf in Iraq. Still, I didn’t think it unreasonable to hope to find a strong, striking woman in the Sigourney Weaver mold and to spark a torrid romance while playing a role in the great events of the day.

Several months later--at 11:34 p.m., on Thursday, November 10, 2005, to be precise--I was chagrined to find that the script for my life in Baghdad appeared instead to have been written by Dashiell Hammett. That was when the body of Herb Bennett, my partner on the RAG advisory team, fell from the three-storey-tall roof of the new Australian house in the Green Zone and landed with a sickening mix of crunch and squish, half-in and half-out of the pool. Being who I was, my first thoughts were of Sam Spade and Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him, he was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it. ... And when one of your organization gets killed, it's - it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. Bad all around.

The Maltese Falcon came to mind because the advisory team of Herb Bennett and Will Perdue (that’s me, by the way) was as unhappy an outfit as the Spade & Archer detective agency. Herb and I had radically different agendas and objectives for our gig in Iraq; to put it less politely, we hated each others’ guts. My own reasons for being in Baghdad were straightforward. I was trying to hide from a longstanding fear that I somehow bore a mark of Cain that made me stand out as different, potentially dangerous, and ultimately unlovable. This had driven me since childhood to seek refuge in books and movies and to erect a wall of intellectual arrogance to protect me from unknown persecutors lurking somewhere out in the world. As an adult employed by the U.S. Government the same impulse drove me to volunteer for duty at Embassies in the far suburbs of the world. The quirks arising from this behavior had been compounded by my failed efforts as a husband and father. I liked the abstract idea of marital commitment, parenthood, and being a real adult, but like Groucho Marx I lost interest in any club--or marriage or family--that would have me as a member. Maybe I was just in love with falling in love, whether with a new girlfriend or wife or child. Even as my fortieth birthday became a distant memory and I neared the half-century mark, I kept looking for relationships that were intense sprints rather than plodding marathons. No matter where I went--Africa, Washington, Paris--I couldn’t or wouldn’t change this outlook. So, when Iraq became a chronic crisis offering numerous “unique career-enhancing opportunities” for the people in my organization, I jumped at the first one that came my way. I judged that head-chopping insurgents, indiscriminate mortar rounds, and the Embassy’s security paranoia would make my various troubles think twice before trying to catch up with me on the banks of the Tigris. I latched on to the job as an escape and as a fatter paycheck that would leave a somewhat less paltry pittance for me after taking care of the alimony and child support I owed the families I had left behind in the States. I expected little else from the job and hoped I would receive the grace of benign neglect from the Embassy’s top management and from Washington. I figured that, if I and my colleagues managed to avoid creating the sort of embarrassment that would make titillating front-page reading in the Washington Post, the job would be a roaring success. As for my Iraqi advisees, I arrived in Baghdad expecting nothing of them.

Herb had come out to Baghdad for less noble motives: duty and ambition. Only 36 years old, he had been fast-tracked to GS-15, and he expected to reach the Senior Executive Service by his 40th birthday. Back home he had been the first staffer in our Director’s office to recognize that 12-point Courier New font was much better suited for a Republican administration than the 11.5-point Times New Roman that had been the favorite of the Clinton White House, and he was the master of making PowerPoint slides appear as if they were grounded in reality. Herb believed in Progress and Democracy and the Global War on Terror, both intrinsically and because he had been sent out to the front lines of the great and noble crusade. Unburdened by adult experience beyond the Beltway, he knew Iraq was the place where he could make his mark. Drawing strength from his ignorance of anything to do with Iraq or the Middle East at large, Herb was certain that the Iraqis shared the Mission and that our local friends were all as innocent as any Congressman or Assistant Secretary back home of pecuniary corruption, ego aggrandizement, or the other sins, misdemeanors, felonies, and character deformations found in war and politics. Moreover, living and working in Iraq was for Herb a sort of Boy Scout Summer camp. Every day was a chance for him to dress his short, chubby frame and oddly oval head in his Halloween costume of a mercenary security consultant: shaved cranium, Oakley sunglasses, scraggly goatee, cargo pants, steel-toed boots, shooter’s vest, and Under-Armour tee-shirt. Now, though, Herb’s grandiose plans and annoying peculiarities were moot because he was dead.

After my brain had quickly screened the first reel of The Maltese Falcon, my second thought that Thursday night was that, damn it, Herb had gone and ruined a perfectly good party. Marina Seeley, the Aussie liaison who helped us with our work with the Iraqis at the intelligence section of the Ministry of Defense, had invited us to their celebration of having finally moved out of the British compound and set up their own digs in a villa that once belonged to Uday Hussein. Marina was radiant with happiness at having escaped the British housing area--a covered parking garage packed well past the point of claustrophobia with shipping containers and ironically called "Ocean Cliffs"--when she greeted Herb and me on our arrival. A toothy smile and gin-flushed cheeks showed off shoulder-length blonde hair and world-class cleavage to great advantage.

"It's so great you guys could make it. Let me give you the grand tour," she said, linking her arms through Herb's and mine. I tried hard to banish the hope that the alcohol in her bloodstream and unaccustomed high heels on her feet would send those delectable breasts tumbling my way.

"This place is of couse overdone in the full Sargon Quartorze style, but that's Uday for you," Marina said. "I've never seen so many gold-plated bidets in my life. But I think we'll be very comfy here, thank you. I mean, Uday may have been a brutal psychopath, but take a look around and you'll see he knew how to pick a setting for parties. Look at how nicely he set off the pool, with two sides of sheer wall for the house and that lovely sunken bar down there to your left, and then we've go this great lawn here. Maybe you might fancy some croquet later on?"

I for one was impressed. "Marina," I said, "You did real well here. Why, if Jay Gatsby had been in Baghdad, staging swank soirées to lure Daisy Buchanan from the east bank of the Tigris to the west, from Rusafa to al-Karkh, this is the house he would have built."

"Well, Will, I'll just have to hang out a green light and see what happens," Marina answered. Not bad, I thought, for a girl from the wrong side of the world. "You guys will have to excuse me for now, I've gotta help with the Dutch Ambassador--looks like he's already tanked."

As we watched Marina totter off excitingly in her heels, Herb scrunched his brow and asked, "Gatsby's the new chief of Congressional liaison back home, right? I don't think I know Daisy."

"No, man, you're thinking of somebody else," I answered with as much tact as I could fake. "C'mon, let's go see what they're doing with this place."

The Aussies were putting it to good use. The bar was fully stocked. In a nice touch of sophistication, the Aussies had set out cases of decent wine--that is, wine that hadn’t turned to vinegar during the long, hot haul across the desert from Jordan and Lebanon--in addition to the beer, whiskey, vodka, and gin laid on for meat-and-potatoes drinkers like me. The music was mostly Wham! and other forgettable 80s pop, but it was loud and danceable. Maybe a third of the guests were women--a great ratio by Green Zone standards--and these were drawn from the Zone’s A-list of females: junior political officers at the US Embassy, UN election monitors, aid workers from the UK and Danish missions. My favorite touch, especially after my third or fourth Jim Beam, was the disco ball and laser light mounted in the middle of the garden for the pleasure of dancers and drunks. The laser was aimed at the spinning ball, which in turn flashed light in all directions. The light that went upwards registered on sensors in the US Army helicopters carrying the young men maimed in the day’s combat in Ramadi and Tall Afar to the Combat Support Hospital at Ibn Sina in the Green Zone. The helos’ packages of electronic counter-measures read the laser pulses refracted by the disco ball as efforts by a hostile surface-to-air missile battery to acquire a target, and they fired off flares to confound the suspected attack, spraying the sky and illuminating our festivities with hot reds, luminescent greens, and phosphorous-tinged yellows. Even with the fireworks, though, Herb started whining almost from the moment we arrived. The music was too loud, there weren’t enough women and the party was nothing but a dude ranch, the girls that were there were too nuts-and-granola for his tastes, on and on. After a while he realized that I was paying a lot more attention to Jim Beam and Mireille Duclos, the Canadian human rights monitor with the slender figure and crooked smile, than to him, and he announced--largely to the air--that he was looking for a quiet place to smoke a cigar. Those were the last words I ever heard Herb say.

Only my third thought after Herb’s fall included doing anything even remotely responsible. I stepped away from the bar where I had gone for refills for Mireille and myself (she was going that evening for the Australian Black Swan Cabernet Sauvignon), and made my way to Herb’s body, which had conveniently landed at the end of the pool closest to the bar. I pushed my way through a speechless, shocked knot of partygoers, and found that a rare sober Aussie had pulled Herb out of the pool, placed him on his back, and was squatting by his head.

“He your friend,” the Aussie asked without shifting his glance from Herb’s head and neck.

“Yeah, he’s Herb Bennett. We work together at the U.S. Embassy. We're friends of Marina. Seeley. Jesus.” Blood was streaming from Herb’s ears and nose, the back of his skull had gone flat and pink and red, and his head had flopped an unnatural 90 degrees to the right.

“I don’t think it’s even worth trying CPR on him,” the Aussie said. “Your mate caught the edge of the pool with his back, here, breaking pretty cleanly, and then the back of his skull smashed into the concrete, you can see the mark, there. I think it killed him immediately.”

“Jesus.” I was full of helpful theological observations but otherwise numb. Marina appeared, the glow gone from her face, and said something to me. I think she's the one who covered Herb’s face with a beach towel but then I lost her. I sat down on the cement apron along the pool, wrapping my arms around my knees. Most of the other partygoers staggered out; Mireille brushed me on the shoulder, whispered “Courage, chéri--call me” in my ear, and joined the exodus. I thought, damn, dealing with this dead asshole is going to take a lot of time and explanation.

The Aussie who had been first to the body seemed to be taking charge. He told me his name was Devon McNabb, and he was in charge of Australian Embassy security. I let him know I was Will Perdue, from the U.S. Embassy.

“You see, I’m new here, and I’m not certain what the drill is if a foreign civilian drops dead on our premises,” McNabb explained. “I’d be in better shape, procedures-wise, if there’d been a mortar round dropping in. Now, since you’re the mate of, what did you say his name was? Herb? Well, I’d like to ask you to stay here until we get stuff sorted out with your Embassy and your security people come. You might be able to help. Since he’s dead, I don’t want to move the body until your security people--and I don’t know whether they’ll be military or civilians--get a look at the scene. At some point I suppose they’ll take him over to Ibn Sina for an autopsy and a forensic look. I’ve got to make some phone calls, but Tony and some of the other lads here will be able to take care of you. Oy! Tony! If you’ve got the coffee ready, get a cup over here for Will!”

McNabb wandered off with a cell phone clapped to his ear. Tony and the other lads--revealed as members of the Australian Embassy’s security detail by the muscled bulk, tight t-shirts, shaved heads and aggressive facial hair they shared with all the well-paid DynCorp, Black Hawk, and other mercenaries protecting us--led me to a table on the lawn. Coffee was put in front of me as promised, and I was left alone. The security guys assembled briefly around McNabb, then dispersed across the compound, looking, I guessed, for evidence. McNabb lifted the blanket covering Herb to peek at something and then improvised a cordon around the body with some plastic pool chairs. He disappeared inside. I saw a light, or maybe lights, up on the roof; somebody must have been having a look at the starting point of Herb’s plunge.
After taking this in I remembered that I wasn’t the only person with a stake in Herb’s death. I took the cell phone from my pocket and called Jim O’Dwyer, my boss and the chief of the Research and Analysis Group in Baghdad. I braced for his likely eruption at being woken up at midnight to learn of the death of one of his officers.

“Hello?” Jim’s voice rasped sleepily out of my phone.

“Jim, this is Will, Will Perdue. I’m sorry to call so late, but I’ve got some bad news that I didn’t think would wait.” I paused to be certain that he would be awake for the story.

“I’m listening. What the hell’s wrong, Will?”

“Well, I’m at the Australian Embassy house, in Little Venice, and something bad happened to Herb Bennett at the party here. He went up to the roof, fell, and died. It looks pretty certain like it’s an accident, but the Aussies are doing some investigating.”

“Dead. Herb’s dead. Christ, that’s just what we need. Do you know what that means, Will?”

“Um, there’s going to be a lot of work for you and for all of us, what with telling the home office what happened, and pulling his effects together, and then we’ll have to deal with the Iraqis of course.”

“You’ve gotta understand,” O’Dwyer said. “We don’t control the investigation. I think it’ll be done by that fuckhead legal attaché from the FBI, maybe you’ve not met her, Eleanor Kelley, and she’s brainless even by the Bureau’s standards. Shit. You and me, we’ll have to spend a lot of time with that worthless woman. She’s probably on her way over to the Aussie place now, and you’ll get to deal with her. Of course she’ll start bugging me later. Nothing I can do about that now. Shit. Right now, I need to be certain I know what you know, so I can tell Washington. Let’s see if I got your story straight here. Herb died at the Australian Embassy, a social event, and it looks like an accident, a fall. We’ll get more details later. Is that right?” I grunted assent. “Good. Okay, Will, stay there and work with Eleanor Kelley or whoever the Embassy sends to start the investigation. Tell them pretty much whatever they want to know, but if they ask too many questions about the details of Herb’s job, send them my way; you’ve been around long enough to know the drill. And first thing in the morning, come see me so we can get this squared away. I’ve got to get into the office now. Son of a motherfucking bitch.” Jim hung up.

The call over, I sat at the table where the Aussies had parked me, wondering whether anybody would notice if I quietly slipped out. I wasn’t able to test my bugging-out skills because McNabb emerged from the semi-dark with a woman swaying slightly as she tried to keep up with him. She looked to be closing in on the half-century mark, like me, and to have put on a bit more weight over the years than she was willing to admit, also like me. As she passed through a pool of light, I saw that her face was fair and flushed, with lipstick and mascara applied liberally, almost operatically. A partially-buttoned blouse displayed a healthy expanse of cleavage. She was wearing tight jeans, maybe a size too small--unless it was her butt and hips that were now a size too big--and she appeared to have been poured into the denim. Her feet were jammed into a pair of spikey heels that clacked along the poolside cement. Yielding as always to primal male instinct, I let my eyes wander to the cleavage, and then saw that the woman was wearing a shoulder holster with a Glock 9-mm pistol nestled next to her left breast.

McNabb brought the woman up to my table. “Will,” he said. “Thanks for waiting while we tried to sort everything out. This is Eleanor Kelley, the FBI lady at your Embassy. She’s gonna take over whatever needs doing in the way of investigation and reporting on what happened to your mate.”

Eleanor and I shook hands. I manfully kept my eyes fixed on her face and away from that tantalizing juxtaposition of weapon and cleavage. McNabb excused himself. Eleanor sat down, looked me over, and leaned forward in a way that brought the holster and left breast even closer together. I caught a strong hint of eau de Tennessee--Jack Daniels--on her breath. Her eyes slipped down from my face along my torso, halted somewhere around my belt-buckle--I couldn’t say whether north or south--and returned to my face. In the uncertain light the eyes looked hazel and a bit bloodshot. “I know, the pool,” she said, only slightly slurring her syllables. “I’ve seen you in the pool, swimming a bit and sunbathing a lot, just about every Friday and Saturday morning since the Summer. You’re the guy with the nice deep even tan, on the back and chest and legs. It would just about be perfect if you could take care of that gut. Will. Perdue. It’s nice to have a name to place on the tan.”

I’m not certain how I expected the official investigation into Herb’s death would begin, but I know my preconceptions didn’t include a flirtatiously tipsy FBI agent whose breasts were competing with her sidearm for my attention.

“Ah, thanks, Eleanor,” I replied. “Yeah, I do try to get in some laps and some sun on the weekend.” I would normally have been flirting right back after her comment on my tan, but that seemed inappropriate even to me in the context.

“I guess you’re looking for information on Herb and what might have happened to him here,” I continued, hoping to remind her why she had been called to the Aussie residence. “Just tell me what you want to know, and I’ll try to help however I can. I spoke about what happened to my boss, Jim O’Dwyer, I think you know him, and of course he said I should cooperate fully with your investigation.”

The mention of Jim O’Dwyer seemed to sober Eleanor up and cool her ardor. Her face went from flirtatious smile to the subtle grimace of someone reminded of the day in fourth grade when her mother loudly delivered her diarrhea medicine in front of the whole class. She sat back a bit, which eased the strain in her blouse, folding silk over a good bit of the exposed cleavage, and reached for a small notebook that had been wedged in the waistband of her jeans. She proceeded to question me crisply and professionally about Herb and what had happened that night.

I told her I had known Herb for about three months, since we both arrived to work at RAG. No, he didn’t have any enemies, certainly nobody who’d want to kill him. His health seemed pretty good, other than some of the usual gastro-intestinal bouts with Saddam’s Revenge, and I didn’t think he was taking any sort of medication. I wasn’t aware of anything unusual with his life back home. He lived in the far end of Loudon County, almost in West Virginia, with his fiancée and talked about getting married when he returned home, in July or August ’06. No, I’d never heard him say anything suicidal or behave in any way that might reflect a desire to do himself in. Tonight Herb and I came to the party together; we’d both been invited by Australians we worked with. I thought he’d had one, maybe two beers, and he didn’t look or sound intoxicated. The last time I saw him and spoke to him was maybe eleven, eleven-fifteen, when he told he was going off to smoke a cigar somewhere quiet.

Eleanor signaled the interview’s end by shutting the notepad and returning it to her waistband. I gave her my card, with the phone number and e-mail on it, and said of course I’d be available to answer any further questions she might have. She leaned forward again, silk slid away to expose full cleavage, but my attention was riveted once again by the Glock nuzzling her left breast through the holster.

“Thank you, Will, you’ve been real helpful,” she said. “Herb’s death must have been hard for you, and you’re holding up so well. You don’t have to see me just as the FBI investigator here. I can also be your friend, and if you want to talk, or, well, anything, well, I can be there for you.”
As she finished, her right hand came to rest halfway up my left thigh, with her index finger lightly stroking the inside. The signal was unsubtle and unwelcome. I generally don’t play hard to get, but there are times when I say no. An advance from a drunk law enforcement officer wearing a sidearm had trouble written all over it, especially since I’d never understood the way handcuffs and nightsticks turn some guys on.

“Well, thank you, Eleanor, for your kindness,” I said, hoping to disabuse her gently of any possibility of amorous interest on my part. I pushed my chair back, stood up, took her right hand in mine for a chaste shake, and then gently disengaged. “I’ll give you a call in a day or two to see how I can help you. I’m sorry we had to meet in these circumstances.”

Eleanor remained in her chair. A light behind her was in my eyes, and I couldn’t see her face. “Yes, again, thanks for your help, Will. I’m sorry we had to wait for your friend’s death to meet.”
I headed for the parking lot outside the wall around the Aussie house. On the way out I passed the pool. Herb’s body was gone, presumably to the hospital morgue. Ghoulishly, as I took note of the dark blotches on the cement where he had landed and bled, I wondered how the stain could be removed. McNabb was in the poolside bar, perched on a stool and smoking a cigar. I thanked him for the help with Herb’s death. He nodded, silently shook my hand, and waved me off on my way. At the main gate to the house Marina stepped silently out of a shadow, gave me a quick hug, said she was so sorry, and told me to get home safely.

Going home seemed to take forever. The Green Zone is only about four square miles, and it usually takes just a few minutes to get anywhere. That Thursday night, or rather early that Friday morning, time and distance expanded. I felt as if I was taking in every detail of the scenery and the road between the Aussie house and the RAG end of the U.S. Embassy compound. I don’t know whether this was due to my unusual sobriety or the impact of Herb’s death. As I walked out of the house to my car, I was struck by how different the Aussies’ neighborhood was from the rest of the Green Zone. The expatriates called the area Little Venice, because of its water channels and decorative ponds. Little Venice luxuriated in the cool, humid green of relative forests of trees and bushes, a welcome change from the 12-foot-tall concrete blast walls, HESCO barriers, and odd piles of sandbags in the compound around the hideously ornate Republican Palace that served as the US Embassy. In the parking lot I dispensed with the mandatory security check under the carriage, in the exhaust pipe, and on the roof of my vehicle--was a myopic, distracted, sleep-starved middle-age man really going to find a bomb in the dark?--and tugged open the door of the up-armored Mercedes SUV. The road through Little Venice took me by Uday’s Porn Palace, where a decrepit generator was coughing out juice for two or three spot-lights that shed pale, yellowish pools of illumination on random spots of grubby masonry and weed-choked water. People said that Saddam’s son had this garish, pond-front pile of concrete built especially for al fresco screenings from his world-class collection of dirty movies. Uday and his cronies would sit on a platform above the projection room and in the warm Mesopotamian night smoke cigars, drink Scotch, chat, laugh, and admire images of unnatural and violent couplings that inspired their own sessions of whoring and rape. The jagged shadows cast by the play of dim lights on grimy architecture for a moment seemed to summon ghosts seeking vengeance for painful, humiliating deaths. I gave my head a quick shake, which only jarred loose the fact that I’d spent the past couple of hours in the company of Herb’s broken body. I promised myself I’d get more sleep and drink less--and quickly took the turn that got the Porn Palace out of my rearview mirror and then took me out of Little Venice.

I got on the street going past Ibn Sina Hospital--which mercifully appeared to have suspended airborne intake for the night--and headed for the Embassy compound. This street was even deader and more inhuman at three in the morning than in daylight. Ibn Sina and the adjacent buildings that housed reconstruction and support contractors loomed dully behind the ubiquitous blast walls, whose gray soaked up the desultory light emitted by decrepit security lamps that looked like surplus from the British Mesopotamia Protectorate of the 1920s. Knee-high Jersey barriers served to channel traffic through identity controls and security inspections into the various offices. Every 50 yards signs reminded me, in English and Arabic, that parking and stopping were strictly prohibited and that deadly force was authorized. At the Marine checkpoint on the edge of the Embassy perimeter, I went through the usual ritual: stop 25 yards away, dim the exterior lights, switch on the dome light, finger the ID card on the lanyard around my neck to double-check it was visible, wait for the double flash from the sentry’s flashlight. Late night for you, sir. Not as late for me as for you, Corporal, but at least it’s not too hot right now. That’s right, sir; you’re okay, go on in. Thank you, Corporal, good night.

I parked in the lot by the PX, in a latecomer’s space at the back end of beyond, and threaded my way through the rows of armored vehicles, the military’s HMMVs and APCs dwarfing the civilian contractors’ over-sized Land Rovers and Mercedes and Hummers. I crossed the road by the Green Zone’s heli-port, Landing Zone Washington, and entered the last Controlled Access Checkpoint, calling a cheery “Namaste” and steepling my hands in greeting to the bored Nepalese Gurkha guards as I flashed my ID. My Himalayan salutation had the desired effect of getting the Gurkhas to remove their right hands from the trigger guards of their M-4s so they could reciprocate: “Namaste, sah. Good night.” Down the dirt road leading from the CAC to the RAG compound, the blast walls seemed closer and higher than ever. As I passed the Embassy’s bank of generators, behind the walls to my left, I was certain they had gone from humming to roaring since Herb and I had walked past them a few hours earlier, going the other way. I opened my mouth to comment on this to Herb, and then remembered that he was dead and that was why I was so late and so sober. I’m starting to scare myself here, I thought; I need a good night’s sleep and then maybe it’ll make sense. I turned the corner into the compound, ducked between a row of modular housing pods and a wall of Hesco sand barriers, and walked the 50 yards to my own room. I opened the door and kicked off my sandals in a well-practiced move. As my head dropped to the pillow, the luminous hands on my watch showed it was three-oh-something.